We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day – machine learning edition

“Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.”

Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg columnist. ($)

Possible hiccups

Some work is going on under the hood, so Samizdata may be a bit dyspeptic for a while until things get sorted. Here are some cat pictures to make you less sad.

Who would be a landlord in Ireland when they could Airbnb?

There is much anger in Ireland over the country’s ongoing housing crisis. The Dail put in place an eviction ban over the winter. It got them some good headlines for a while, but the ban had the usual effect of driving smaller landlords out of the market, making the crisis worse. The ban is due to expire on 31st March. This will result in many people being evicted simultaneously on 1st April. Reddit Ireland is outraged. Here is a thread titled “Disgraceful” about how many Airbnb properties are available compared to how few long term rental properties. In fact the comparison is false. As a commenter called “Th0rHere” says, “Airbnb shows listings even when booked (to make future bookings possible). Daft [a property website] shows only available places to rent right now, as your not going to advertise place to rent if it’s already being rented. These numbers are not comparable.”

Even so, it is true that an awful lot of Irish properties that used to be let to long term tenants are now given over to Airbnb. I have posted about the issue a couple of times. Why is this happening? Why would anyone choose the constant work and uncertainty of letting out their property as an Airbnb over the stability of having a long term tenant?

On that same “Disgraceful” thread, a Reddit Ireland commenter called “RestrepoDoc2” explained why:

If I was a property owner with an apartment or flat in a popular tourist area I’d have to weigh up the benefits of renting to someone on a long term rental compared to short term lets on Airbnb.

I can’t really come up with any benefits of a long term rental agreement other than less property management logistics ie. getting cleaners in, checking the property for damage or stolen items between guests and providing keys, codes etc.

The benefits of Airbnb to the property owner are nearly too abundant to outline in any real detail but just off the top of my head.

Security of your property, card details and passport details held by Airbnb, guest history, can meet them in person. Any antisocial behaviour in the property can be dealt with by local police as they can enter your property with your permission and make people leave (I assume).

You can rent it out as suits you, can stay in it when you want, store your property in a locked storage room there, let family or friends stay in it sometimes. You can do repair work or refurbishment when you want.

You don’t have to worry about if a tenant has job security, you don’t have to tiptoe around the subject of HAP or any disabilities a prospective tenant might declare to you at a viewing. You don’t have to consider arranging inspections of your property by RTB agents. You don’t need to pay for a professionally drawn up rental agreement, or drafted legal letters in case of non payment, damage to property, refusal to allow reasonable access for inspection, anti-social behaviour, notifications in writing of rent increases or end of tenancy etc. Then there’s the rent a mob crowds like CATU being legitimised by attention seeking opposition party TDs and local councillors. They will literally turn up to intimidate any property owner once a dispute is raised by a tenant whether they’re refusing to pay rent, squatting, changing the locks of your property etc.

There’s been several local councillors and a partially state funded organisation in Threshold literally advising people to break the law by refusing to move out of someone’s property even when given relevant notice and for permitted reasons. This is forcing property owners to seek a court order which could take another year etc. With the upcoming vote about extending the eviction ban and talk of further infringing on property owners rights. Realistically it may soon not even be possible to sell your property, to move a family member or yourself into the property, to carry out refurbishments on your own property.

Basically it would be madness to choose to provide a long term rental lease to somebody. Instead of fixing that mess of a situation caused by government intervention, they are trying to ban Airbnb or regulate it out of existence.

RestrepoDoc2’s comment got 3 upvotes, one of which was mine.

A comment from “Irish_drunkard” saying, “We banned Uber because it would effect our taxi business, why can’t we ban AirBNB?” got 985 upvotes.

Samizdata quote of the day – risk management edition

“A bank without a chief risk officer is a bit like a football team without a left tackle. It’s not the sexiest position on the field, and most fans couldn’t recognize him without a helmet, but what the left tackle does is crucial. He’s the guy protecting the quarterback’s blind side when a 250-pound pass rusher is trying to pulverize him. Silicon Valley Bank not having a chief risk officer for a brutal year in tech was the equivalent of that left tackle walking off the field during a blitz.”

Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal ($). He is reflecting on how Silicon Valley Bank did not have a chief risk officer in place for eight months. The reason why classical liberals should focus on this aspect of the bank’s demise is because at the moment there are calls for yet more rules and regulations on banks. But the problem in my view is that there are plenty of rules, but they aren’t often enforced consistently, or intelligently. (Apologies to non-followers of NFL football, but I think you get the point of it.)

But Cohen adds this important caveat, which is another twist on the whole “moral hazard” argument that we hear about a lot when banks fail: “The existence of a chief risk officer created the appearance of proper oversight and satisfied regulators, but having someone to police risk meant the traders actually taking those risks might have felt they didn’t have to be so vigilant.”

Hmm. So in the end, having a CRO in place might, ironically, make a bank even more cocky because of the assumption that there is a person there to keep everyone on-point.

You are wrong about the number of people who agree with you

Vlad Vexler noticed that nearly everyone online was certain that Putin sent a body double to Mariupol rather than visiting himself. Then he ran a poll, which revealed that most people weren’t quite so sure, and actually more people thought it was more likely that Putin did go himself.

The point being that it is very hard to tell from the shouting and hollering in, say, social media commentary, what proportion of people really agree with a thing.

That institution might underestimate how much of the general population are actually not on board with these projects. It could happen because some of the leading newspapers, most of the universities, much of the discourse in the social media forums normalise something that might in fact have only persuaded a section of the population. It could be even some kind of elite, some kind of educated elite or some kind of urban elite or whatever. But that institution, let’s say the BBC, might go on as though actually 80% of the population are persuaded and it’s only 12% that are sort of not quite there because they’re irrational or because they are backward or don’t see things that way. But they’re a minority anyway. The problem isn’t whether these social justice projects are right or wrong; the problem is you’re assuming an act of persuasion has happened that hasn’t happened. […]

It’s so toxic to broadcast to the country and pretend that the 20% represents the 80%.

It can work the other way, too. In Vexler’s example, if the BBC writes an article and 7000 comments complain about it and only 1000 comments agree with it, it might become scared of shifting tides of culture, that the majority are against them, and they might start to take defensive measures; to treat as normal a minority opinion.

Vexler argues that these kinds of misjudgements cause political shifts and are dangerous for democracy. Even on a small scale I think it is unhelpful to go around thinking that Twitter, for example, reveals very much about what people are, in general, thinking.

You are almost certainly wrong, one way or another, about how many people agree with you*.

*Unless you are libertarian. Then the answer is 11

Samizdata quote of the day – parallel universes edition

To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.

For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?

Freddie Sayers

I am glad it is no longer necessary to drown kittens, but the people of the past were not evil for doing it

Self-described “Poe/history blogger and crazy cat lady” Undine @HorribleSanity has unearthed a page from an old children’s book with a moral likely to disturb most modern readers:

I wonder what this little girl is crying about ? O ! I have found out. John has taken the kittens from the old cat, and has drowned them in the pond ; and she is ready to call him a heartless creatore for doing so. Do you think he is ? O, no. It would be cruel, indeed, to torment the kittens as some children do ; but John was told to drown them for the convenience of the family ; so dry up your tears, Miss Lucy.

When I was a child my mother told me that when she was a child in the late 1930s and early 1940s it was still routine for litters of kittens to be drowned. There was a local man who probably made a living as a general odd-job man but who my mother and her sister hated because they saw him only in his role as “the kitten-drowner”. When my grandmother called him round to do the deed, my mother and her sister would hide while it was done and be upset for days afterwards.

But what else were people to do back then? If nature is allowed to take its course, a female cat can easily bear three litters a year. Let’s say three kittens per litter. Where you had one cat you now have ten, and it is not just your Tibbles doing that, but every cat in the neighbourhood, and it is not long before the kittens grow up and start mating with each other. To be sure, the geometric progression will not continue forever. That’s because in a society that has no practical means to stop them breeding, most stray cats either starve to death or are killed by the almost equally uncontrollable population of stray dogs. Unless, that is, someone spares them from this miserable life and lingering death by killing them in a relatively merciful way soon after birth.

Dogs, it is true, can usually be kept from breeding by not letting them run loose. But for most of human history the whole point of having a cat was that it would feed itself and earn its place in a human home by killing mice. It can’t do that on a lead. Commercially made cat food began to be produced in the 1930s. So it did exist when my mother was a child but only as a luxury product. Her family were far from rich. Their cats were given table scraps to supplement their main diet of mice, but the idea of paying for meat to feed a cat when humans often went without would have seemed ridiculous.

Given that she is a history blogger with a specific interest in what TV Tropes calls “Values Dissonance”, I am sure Undine knows all this, but some of her audience clearly have not thought it through. “I hope whoever wrote that is burning in hell,” says one of the replies to her tweet.

Rather than call down damnation on people for whom killing kittens was the least inhumane option, it would be better to call down blessings on those who made it no longer necessary. Those who developed anaesthetics are rightly praised for having freed humans from much suffering, both by making surgical operations pain-free and by making surgery more likely to succeed because it no longer had to be done at speed. These benefits quickly filtered down to animals, too, first to bulls and stallions, and then on to smaller animals like cats and dogs. They can do surgery on hamsters now. If you think that wasteful, remember that the benefit of being able to save a pet goes not just to the animal but to the humans who love it.

As I said, we rightly praise the pioneers of medicine who made this happy situation possible – but the biggest driver in changing possibility to fact was the capitalist system that made us so much richer than our ancestors. We can afford to buy food specially for cats. We can afford to take cats to the vets to get the snip, and to have their annual injections done and their ailments treated. Now that their offspring are greatly reduced in number, we can afford to support animal shelters that will find homes for them if the card in the newsagent’s window doesn’t work. We can afford not to drown kittens.

Samizdata quote of the day – moral hazard edition

“Deposit insurance is a cancer at the heart of the capitalist system, destroying its ethical foundations. Rich depositors should not be able to secure returns, in the good times, for investing in fundamentally riskbearing activities (which fractional reserve deposits are, by their nature) but then be bailed out by the government when times are tougher. And banks are the largest allocators of capital in the economy – so this fundamental injustice gets spread across the entire economic system.”

Andrew Lilico, The Sunday Telegraph (£)

A problem in much of the West is that the large investors who have been bailed out, such as those who did so via Silicon Valley Bank, or Credit Suisse, etc, is that they tend to be politically quite powerful. A lot of the north Californian business class, for instance. And it tends to vote Democratic.

The power of studying humanities

I like the following comments by Adrian Wooldridge, the journalist, writing in Bloomberg ($ paywall) a week ago:

The humanities at their best are also perfectly equipped to provide an education in something that has been sadly lacking in recent business history: human judgment. The notion of judgment might sound a bit vague — certainly compared with the profit and loss of the business balance sheet or the ones and zeros of the digital economy — but the difference between a successful leader and a mediocre one does not lie in the amount of information they possess. It lies in the very human ability to process a vast mass of ambiguous information — sales patterns, technological innovations, political threats — and then make a rapid decision under pressure. The importance of judgment is growing as the world becomes more uncertain and trade-offs become more pressing. Who knows? Perhaps this week’s financial turmoil could have been avoided if Greg Becker, the CEO of the just-shuttered Silicon Valley Bank, had studied the humanities at Indiana University instead of majoring in business.

A preference for deceptive certainties over fuzzy truths has arguably been the biggest problem for business in recent years. Businesspeople have grown incomparably rich since the 1980s by embracing the deceptive certainties of business theory while forgetting the great truths of political theory. They have embraced the cult of shareholder value (paying themselves like owners rather than employees) while also providing themselves with golden parachutes and exploiting every accounting trick in the book. But in so doing they have whipped up popular fury that is threatening to overturn business civilization (and will not be placated by a few bromides about diversity and sustainability).

They would have been wiser if they had studied classical political theory along with contemporary economics and business theory. Aristotle argued vigorously for the “golden mean” on the grounds that a prosperous middle class is necessary to long-term stability. Plato insisted that elites inevitably collapse if they give way to their own appetites rather than restraining themselves in the interest of the public good. Surely Plato+Aristotle is a better formula for understanding the state of modern America than any number of business theorists?

I’d like to quote the whole article but there is a copyright/subscription issue, and I am a free marketeer and respecter of property, after all.

Samizdata quote of the day

Far from robbing anybody of surplus value, Capitalism is like a benevolent ancestor who, instead of consuming all the port that he could get – as some ancestors did – laid down an enormous cellar of it for the use of future generations. And every one who is now alive in this country, and millions abroad likewise, are now able to help themselves to bottles of the grand old vintage then laid down and now ready for us, crusted, fruity, full of ripe flavour and rich bouquet. For none of us could have been so well off, and many of us could not have been born at all, if Capitalism had not done this deed, and done it judiciously and well.

Hartley Withers, The Case for Capitalism, 1920 p239. Withers was editor of the Economist between 1916 and 1921. It’s a good analogy, or ought to be. It ought to make you think of science, shipping, railways, hospitals, educational institutions. Unfortunately, in my case it – especially the “rich bouquet” bit – makes me think of sewers.

The British Government is going to hijack your phone…

We are now forewarned that the British government has chosen St. George’s Day, 23rd April 2023, to trial a new ‘alert’ system by sending alerts to the phones of everyone in the UK. It seems that you have to interact with the phone to stop it blaring a siren-like noise at you, and so acknowledge this impertinence.

However, not all phones can receive these ‘alerts’. The functionality is limited:

Compatible mobile phones and other devices

Make sure your device has all the latest software updates.

Emergency alerts work on:

iPhones running iOS 14.5 or later
Android phones and tablets running Android 11 or later
If you have an earlier version of Android, you may still be able to receive alerts. To check, search your device settings for ‘emergency alerts’.

But you can turn off these alerts on your phone (if you are socially-unfriendly):

You can opt out of emergency alerts, but you should keep them switched on for your own safety.

To opt out:

Search your settings for ‘emergency alerts’.
Turn off ‘severe alerts’ and ‘extreme alerts’.
If you still get alerts, contact your device manufacturer for help.

Blimey, something the government acknowledges that it can’t help me with, is this a first?

But what, pray, is this all for?

You may get alerts about:

severe flooding
fires
extreme weather

One might hope that severe flooding and fires would be incompatible, but perhaps with the climate emergency, Mr Sunak will set the Thames on fire.

And the form of this message?

It ain’t half hot, Mum!

Not exactly:

What happens when you get an emergency alert

Your mobile phone or tablet may:

make a loud siren-like sound, even if it’s set on silent
vibrate
read out the alert
The sound and vibration will last for about 10 seconds.

An alert will include a phone number or a link to the GOV.UK website for more information.

OK, but what should I do if I get an ‘alert’?

What you need to do

When you get an alert, stop what you’re doing and follow the instructions in the alert.

But does this apply to say, surgeons in an operating theatre? This is not mentioned.

And wait, what if I am…

If you’re driving or riding when you get an alert

You should not read or otherwise respond to an emergency alert whilst driving or riding a motorcycle.
If you are driving, you should continue to drive and not respond to the noise or attempt to pick up the mobile phone and deal with the message.
Find somewhere safe and legal to stop before reading the message. If there is nowhere safe or legal to stop close by, and nobody else is in the vehicle to read the alert, tune into live radio and wait for bulletins until you can find somewhere safe and legal to stop.
It is illegal to use a hand-held device while driving or riding.

Well at least that’s clear…

What is the legal basis for the government taking this power, and why is this not explained?

And presumably, if there’s someone running amok with knives or guns, this won’t be part of the alert system, when it might actually be unexpected, unlike the weather.

I can see where this is going. It will eventually be used to warn people that Nigel Farage is making a speech locally and that they should stay indoors and not follow the event on social media.

Sorry, I was being overly cynical there, I have seen this:

If you cannot receive emergency alerts

If you do not have a compatible device, you’ll still be informed about an emergency. The emergency services have other ways to warn you when there is a threat to life.

Emergency alerts will not replace local news, radio, television or social media.

That’s good to know, I had been wondering if it would. And I am pleased to hear that I won’t be getting messages from Robert Spencer if there is a certain type of rare incident in the locality. Then again, what if there is a hippo on the loose? Is there a template alert message for that, if not, why not? Are you seriously trying to protect us? Will it sound if there is, say, an unexpected landing on a beach by persons unknown?

Around 35 years ago, the late Auberon Waugh said that people only go into politics for the pleasure of pressing switches and watching us all jump. This figure of speech has become reality.

Samizdata quote of the day – Oxfam delenda est

Oxfam has come a long way since it was founded 81 years ago. There was a time in the dim and distant past when its primary purpose was to raise money from well-meaning, relatively affluent folks and use their donations to assuage the hunger pangs of the poor and downtrodden across the globe. It was a worthy cause.

Those days are long over. For some time now it’s been more associated with Left-wing agitprop than famine relief. Indeed, you almost get the impression feeding the famished is now seen by some in Oxfam as an annoying diversion from the far more important work of political activism.

Andrew Neill, of whom I am not a great fan overall but this is certainly true.